Rachel Zucker may be Generation X’s likeliest heir to the confessional legacy of Sylvia Plath, Louise Glück, and Sharon Olds. At her best, she matches desperate, pained self-revelation with breakneck lines that spill in and out of long-lined verse and writhing prose. Her previous book, The Last Clear Narrative, is an indispensable study of the passionate ambivalence that is a part of love. This third collection attempts to follow up with a tellingly unclear narrative: the story of a devoted wife and mother struggling with the pain and self-doubt that fidelity to a husband and children can engender. While the difficulties in rendering this conflicted state of mind muddy some of these poems—and occasional obscurity may be the price of the kind of naked confession this poet is after—Zucker has once again created a book that draws the reader through the shadows of family life.

—Craig Morgan Teicher